DeskLock : Lock Down Icon Placements on Windows Desktop

Everytime you install a new software that creates a desktop shortcut, the shortcut icons on the desktop are re-arranged if not instantly then after a system reboot. This makes it very hard to find the shortcuts of programs that you use often. Sometimes even when you drag the desktop shortcut for your most used program to a corner so that you can easily find, this shortcut is also changed to a different position on system restart. This is very annoying and can easily drive you crazy. Pulling the hair on your head is no solution. Instead, you should be using the free program called DeskLock that can lock down the shortcut icons placements on your desktop so that they cannot be changed.

DeskLock is a portable program for Windows PC and can be used without installing anything at all. Just download the DeskLock.exe and run it. As soon as you run it, it places an icon in the system tray and locks down the desktop icons. Now if you try to drag the desktop icons around using your mouse, your mouse cursor keeps falling back to the same position – preventing you from changing the icon positions.

You can right-click on the DeskLock icon in the system tray and choose to enable or disable the DeskLock so that you can make changes to the desktop icon positions. You can also open the settings using this system tray menu.

In the settings for the DeskLock, you can choose to lock icons, disable the right-click context menu, start in the disabled mode, show the class of icons, and assign a hotkey to toggle the DeskLock on or off. You can also enter a comma delimited Windows class list for which locking has to be enabled (only for advanced users).

Conclusion: DeskLock can help you lock down the positions of your desktop icons so that they become immovable and always in the same position even if you try to alter they positions manually.

When executing the program it locked all my icons. However, ist did not put an icon on my system toolbar. As such I am now unable to “unlock” and move my icons. However, I can add icons, but then can’t move them anywhere.

Good Software but I cannot get it to stay on when I reboot. In other words, whenever I restart the Desk Lock software in not in the start up tray. They when I log the icons have been moved and then I must run the software again to get it to work. Any suggestions on fixing this issue?

I don’t get any choice to enable or disable DeskLock on my win7 computer. When I double click on the application in the downloads file, all I get is a text message saying that “disable=^!D”. What do I do with that to disable the program? The icons stay locked. How can I unlock them?